Scripture Daily

Context No. 820 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 23:28-34: in context

28“For the Lord GOD says: ‘Behold, I will deliver you into the hand of them whom you hate, into the hand of them from whom your soul is alienated. 29They will deal with you in hatred, and will take away all your labor, and will leave you naked and bare. The nakedness of your prostitution will be uncovered, both your lewdness and your prostitution. 30These things will be done to you because you have played the prostitute after the nations, and because you are polluted with their idols. 31You have walked in the way of your sister; therefore I will give her cup into your hand.’ 32“The Lord GOD says: ‘You will drink of your sister’s cup, which is deep and large. You will be ridiculed and held in derision. It contains much. 33You will be filled with drunkenness and sorrow, with the cup of astonishment and desolation, with the cup of your sister Samaria. 34You will even drink it and drain it out. You will gnaw the broken pieces of it, and will tear your breasts; for I have spoken it,’ says the Lord GOD.

Ezekiel 23 is one of the hardest chapters in the Bible to read. It tells the story of two sisters, Oholah and Oholibah, standing for Samaria and Jerusalem, the two kingdoms of God's people, and it casts their long infidelity, their idolatry and their scramble to make alliances with one pagan empire after another, as prostitution, described in language so raw that it is meant to shock. God is not being coy about how betrayal feels to him. This section is the sentence on Jerusalem, the younger sister: she will be handed over to the very nations she chased, stripped and scorned and made desolate.

The image the chapter fastens on is a cup. You have walked in the way of your sister, God says, therefore I will put her cup into your hand. Jerusalem will drink the same cup Samaria drank, a cup deep and wide, full of ruin and horror and derision, and she will drain it to the shards. And the tragedy pressed into that image is the unlearned lesson. Jerusalem had watched her older sister do exactly this and be destroyed for it; the northern kingdom had already fallen, already drunk this cup, in living memory. And Jerusalem walked the same road anyway, as if a sibling's downfall were something that happens to other people. The cup of judgment is real and terrible here. It is worth remembering that centuries later, in a garden, another would kneel and pray, let this cup pass from me, and then rise and drink it, the cup no one else could survive, in the place of the guilty.

Jerusalem drank her sister's cup because she would not learn from her sister's fall. Whose downfall have I watched up close and told myself could never be mine, while walking the very road that took them there?

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